Because my brain was still running hot from the events of the past thirty minutes, I went back to the living room to check that Gwen's boyfriend had indeed died with the gun in his right hand; Gracie followed me and hissed at the corpses nervously. She ran after me as I went and dug through a drawer of art supplies near the drafting table until I found what I was looking for: a pair of left-handed scissors.

Good job, bright boy. Now what? I cursed the voice inside my head for not giving me proper credit for being clever, but I knew that voice was right. So Gwen and her boyfriend hadn't killed each other in a jealous rage. I felt a touch relieved at this, the part of me that always wanted to make sure things weren't my fault breathing a sigh of relief. So it meant they were killed and the scene was staged. But whoever killed them likely knew about their lifestyle, thinking that the jealous rage scenario was plausible.

Whoever killed them must have known I was coming.

I was getting tired of situations like this. My heart leapt into my throat as I realized that I was not necessarily alone out here. But anyone who was here wouldn't have waited this long if the intent was to ambush me as well. I repeated this to myself several times before my heart got below a hundred and thirty beats a minute. A long belt of Jim Beam from the bottle in the kitchen helped, and I sat down on the bed, let the cat onto my lap, and counted my options on my fingers, dictating them out loud to keep my brain on track.

I didn't get past two, and one of them was to take all my remaining cash and finance a trip to Costa Rica for a decade or two. The second option was the best I was going to come up with, and as I went out to my car to check if I had any bars on my phone, I realized why I had never kept my friends very long: I asked way too much of them way too soon.

Trubull had left the office but someone there gave me his mobile number as soon as I gave my name. I almost expected them to say "He's expecting your call," but they didn't. Trubull answered after a number of rings, and I was already preparing my message in my head, wondering if it was prudent to say the words "two dead bodies" on someone's voicemail.

"Detective? It's Edmund Coile."

"What did you find?" he asked gravely, perhaps reading the distress in my voice, and I told him.

When I was done, telling as abbreviated a version as I could provide on the spot, there was a brief pause, but only long enough for Trubull to verify that I had stopped. When he spoke he seemed to have a plan already in motion.

"Wipe down everything you touched except doorknobs. If you've got anything in your car or on your person that you shouldn't, lose it," he said as if reading off a clipboard, his voice rapid-fire but calm. "Then call 911. You showed up at her invitation, you found them both dead. Don't try to act overly distraught; people really get very clinical when they call in dead bodies; I suspect it's all these CSI shows."

"Are you coming?" I asked, nervous at the thought of being swarmed by cops even if I hadn't done anything wrong.

"Eventually. The call will go out to Cottage Grove PD, which is where you are, if you didn't know, and they'll send every cop they have--both of them--but I'll monitor the radio and call in an offer to help. Even the most podunk cop in this neck of the woods is used to dead bodies now thanks to meth traffic, but a double homicide in their own home makes me think they'll take county help, and then I'll be along, but you'll probably have to deal with them solo for a time, probably not more than a half-hour."

"What do I say?" I asked, as Gracie stepped out of the house, looked around nonchalantly, and stepped down onto the walkway to roll around. "The truth, up until you went searching through their stuff. That was good, with the scissors, but I'm not sure there's any need for anyone to view this as more than what it looks like on the surface, at least for now."

I sunk down onto the rear bumper of the car, looking out at the sky that was now black. When I was a kid, I hated being outside at night because I could only think about all of the things that the blackness could be hiding. I went through a period in college, encouraged by the effects of early chemical abuse, when I loved wandering around at night, feeling like I was now the one hiding from others, hidden within the anonymity of the dark. Like too many things, I was realizing as I grew older that the child was, in the end, right.

"Is it me they're after?" I asked, not even conscious at first that I was saying it.

"I guarantee it," Trubull said, and hung up the phone.

I did what I was told. I wiped off the scissors and the Jim Beam bottle, then took a deep breath and called 911. The call was painstakingly long, and I knew that I was being kept on the phone to keep me from fleeing the scene, and I repeated several times that I was passing through town, that I had met Gwen at the bar where she worked, that she had invited me over for dinner, that I had arrived to find them dead. The repetition was annoying but calming. It suddenly became less some hideous now and more some packaged, past-tense item of interest read about in the local paper. By the time the two Cottage Grove squad cars were heard taking the turnoff from the county road, I had put my story in paragraph form, which was helpful for dealing with Officers Robertson and Magrew, who had apparently never figured out their good-cop-bad-cop roles; instead, each tried to cover up their inexperience and nervousness with the most schizophrenic displays of tactics-changing I'd ever seen. It was all I could do not to ask them to take it again from the top.

It was forty minutes at least from the time they arrived until the spitting of gravel from Trubull's tires finally made me feel some relief. Robertson and Magrew, or Magrubertson, as I had collectively named the two in my head, had been unsure whether to allow me back into the house, or whether to leave one with me while the other went inside to investigate, and they kept ordering me to remain standing in front of my car while they stepped off towards a toolshed and conferred in whispered tones. The whole effect would have been comical if they hadn't been carrying guns and possessed the authority to arrest me at any moment.

They had managed to see the bodies, individually, and while each had blanched slightly when they emerged, their behavior towards me became less overtly hostile, although they continued to talk about getting tire prints off my car, establishing when I left the hotel, and so forth. I wasn't sure what to tell them when they asked where I had come from just before heading out here. I decided to leave aside my conversation with Trubull and told them I'd come from the hotel, and Robertson nodded solemnly and got on the phone in his prowler as if to check out my story. I assumed for much of the time the three of us were together that they were winging it, and I think they were as relieved as I was when Trubull arrived in a slow, solemn procession of three cars. I read "Forensics examiner" on the middle one.

Trubull got out of the car and looked me over. I couldn't tell how much of it was acting and how much of it was his re-examining my story; there was more of the latter than I wanted to believe, he told me an hour or so later, after he'd gone through the scene, cross-examined me, and then conferred for a long time with Magrubertson and his companions. "I'll talk to him," I heard him say as he stepped towards me, and they didn't give this a second thought. I assumed that Trubull's stoic demeanor and keen intelligence made him ideal for doing this kind of interrogation. "Walk with me a bit," he said, and I strolled with him about thirty feet through the darkness to the edge of a fence. I tripped--and he caught me--several times.

"You should spend more time in darkness; the night vision of most people is going by the wayside due primarily to light pollution from our cities. It's a damn shame." When we arrived at the fence, he pulled a bottle of near-generic bourbon from his pocket. It was a half-pint, and the seal wasn't broken. He had stopped to get it for me.

"Is this where you're brutalizing me?"

"Nah, I always step away from the scene with a suspect or a victim or an accomplice. A 'person of interest.' It's all part of the act, mostly. Useful in this case, though. It was smart you kept tight-lipped about meeting me earlier; I should have made that clear. I was glad I didn't need to. I'd had some second thoughts about our conversation; I figure even Frank could be buffaloed, although any man that can charm his ex-wife's current husband must have something going for him. I believed your story, but I wasn't sure that I should do anything to encourage you to continue."

He gestured back towards the house and waved off the whiskey bottle which I offered to him. "I've got something for you. I went back to the office after I talked to you and spoke with an officer there who knows more about these computer searches than I do. He found something interesting that had recently come over the wire."

I was torn between wanting to finish the bottle out of nervous anticipation and making sure that I was as clear and focused as possible. Seeing as I wanted Trubull to think that I was somewhere near responsible, or at least able to drive myself out of there, I did the latter.

"A car was ticketed in Seattle a couple of weeks ago for having expired out-of-state plates. A lot of people take a chance when they're out of state; they figure the locals don't know the color to look for and so forth. I guess this cop was bored and took a close look. Now, this car was a gray Buick Regal, 1986. Ring a bell?"

It did, but I don't really know cars, but there was something about the phrase "'86 Buick Regal" that I remembered. It was a car that belonged to someone I know or knew.

"Kay's car."

"Bingo. Still had the Texas plates. For a traffic stop, they only ran Kay against the state's database and nothing came up, so they wrote the ticket and let it go. But they also ran the owner of the car, and even though Kay got the ticket, the owner is noted on there. Edgar Coile."

Edgar Coile... my father.